Philip Roth Is Good for the Jews

Fifty-five years ago, the twenty-six-year-old Philip Roth published his first story in The New Yorker, “Defender of the Faith.” It sparked a violent reaction in certain quarters of the Jewish establishment. Roth was vilified as a self-hating Jew and a traitor to his people who had given ammunition to their enemies by seeming to reinforce degrading stereotypes. One character, in particular, aroused the patriarchs’ wrath: Sheldon Grossbart, an Army private during the Second World War who plays on the ambivalent loyalties (as a Jew and an American) of his superior, Sergeant Nathan Marx. Pretending to be devout, the devious Grossbart coaxes Marx into bending certain rules for him, and Marx defies his own scruples to do so, with increasing reluctance as the demands escalate, until he finally exacts revenge for having been conned. Marx, it should be noted, is a combat hero (Jimmy Stewart might have played him), and Grossbart is hardly the Jud Süss. Yet rabbis denounced Roth from their pulpits, and a leading educator at Yeshiva University wrote to the Anti-Defamation League to ask, “What is being done to silence this man? Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him.”

When the story was included, later that year, in Roth’s first volume of fiction, “Goodbye, Columbus,” the defenders of the faith found more apostasy to deplore. (In the title story, a nice Jewish girl, an A student at Radcliffe, gets a diaphragm and takes a lover; in “Epstein,” a hapless middle-aged husband has an affair.) Roth answered his critics in an essay, “Writing About Jews,” that asserted the right of a novelist to explore transgression, which is to say, human nature. “The world of fiction,” he wrote, “frees us from the circumscriptions that society places upon feeling.” Yet the pummelling from his tribal elders left its scars.

Roth, at eighty-one, is now an elder himself—not of one tribe but of two: the world’s great writers and the Chosen People. Last week, in both capacities, he received an honorary degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary. The ceremony was held in a tent decorated with blue and white balloons, a klezmer band played the processional march, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hatikvah” were sung by two young cantors receiving their degrees in sacred music—a man and a woman. (Medieval Jews would have known what to do with her.) When the parents of the graduates were asked to stand, Roth was, he said later, particularly moved. “I have about twelve honorary degrees, and I have never been at a commencement where parents were applauded for the success of their children. That had a special Jewish flavor.” He also thought how proud his own father would have been to see him on the dais. “I welcomed the honor. Who takes Jews more seriously than the J.T.S., and what writer takes Jews more seriously than I do?”

Many members of the audience had copies of Roth’s books to be signed. (Ruth Calderon, a liberal member of the Knesset, who also received an honorary degree, had come with a first edition of “Portnoy’s Complaint.”) Before the robing ceremony, Roth told me, a group of students had engaged him in a spirited discussion of “The Counterlife,” and he had talked to them about Bellow and Malamud. “These kids are my best undergraduate readers,” he said with relish.

At a luncheon for trustees and faculty after the commencement, Roth schmoozed with his fans and posed for photos. A woman offered her congratulations. “We say ‘mazel tov,’ ” he teased her. A rabbi asked him, “Do you like being called a Jewish writer?” “I prefer to be called an American writer,” Roth replied. “Isaac Singer is a Yiddish writer. Amos Oz is a Hebrew writer. A writer is defined by his language.” Another guest thanked Roth for being “one of the first” important Jewish voices to protest settlements in the West Bank (alluding to passages in “Operation Shylock”). “I wasn’t protesting,” Roth protested. “I was just trying to describe reality.” A native of New Jersey then introduced himself as a landsman, and as the son of an insurance broker. Roth’s father, Herman, had worked for a rival company, and “growing up,” the man said, “all Dad talked about was that son-of-a-bitch Roth who got all the business.”

Between the salad course and the entrée (chicken paillard), Roth said a few words of thanks to his hosts. “I have not been embraced by a gathering like this since March of 1946, when my family and friends were assembled to celebrate my bar mitzvah.” Last year, he continued, a high-school friend had phoned him from Florida. “He was going to a lecture about me at a synagogue. Uh-oh, I thought. The title of the lecture was ‘Is Philip Roth an Anti-Semite?’ It was posted on the temple’s billboard at a major intersection; if you were waiting at a red light, you had something to think about.”

Dr. Arnold Eisen, the chancellor of the J.T.S., a distinguished scholar whose work Roth admires, gave his guest of honor something to think about when he noted that there had been unanimous enthusiasm “inside” the seminary for Roth’s degree, though some people “outside” had asked him, “Why are you doing this?” (In a subsequent phone call, however, Eisen tempered the comment: “I never received any protest e-mail. At J.T.S., we are not looking for piety in literature. No one has written more acutely about Israel and its relations with the diaspora—or, for that matter, about circumcision—than Philip Roth. His questions about Jewish life and identity and their dilemmas have always been the right questions, even if I haven’t always agreed with his answers. The outrage that greeted his early work belongs to another era, and so does his sense of being a pariah.”)

The spectre of “outside” voices objecting to his recognition by a bastion of Jewish learning and Conservative theology couldn’t spoil Roth’s pleasure in the morning’s lovefest, but it rankled him. “Look,” he said, “ ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ was published ten years after ‘Defender of the Faith,’ in 1969, and the Jewish reaction to it was completely understandable. I can’t say I didn’t expect it. I had no objection to it, either. I’ve always had literate Jewish readers, even if my most virulent enemy was the greatest scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, who reviewed ‘Portnoy’ in Haaretz, where he wrote, ‘The writer revels in obscenity’ and ‘This is just the book that anti-Semites have been waiting for.’ And I also can’t say that, when ‘Defender of the Faith’ was published, I didn’t know that Jewish nerves were raw. I was not insensitive to the rawness, because I knew where it came from. World War II had ended only thirteen years before, and I came of age in the single most anti-Semitic decade in human history. But rabbis denouncing me from the pulpit, and in their Saturday sermon columns—well, that was disgusting, and it stung.”

The next day, the Forward published an article about the commencement—“PHILIP ROTH, ONCE OUTCAST, JOINS JEWISH FOLD” (it’s a fold that also includes Martin Luther King, Jr., who received an honorary doctorate in 1964)—and Roth sent it to me without comment. But he had one last red-light reflection:

That these displays of narrow-minded literary stupidity that first erupted in response to my work in 1959 should continue to emanate from the McCarthyite right of the Jewish establishment in 2014 is more than a little shameful. Do you think that African-American readers of James Baldwin are still up in arms, if ever they were, because in his fiction Baldwin vividly portrayed black prostitutes, drug addicts, and pimps? Do you think the African-American readers of Ralph Ellison are still up in arms, if they ever were, because in the great opening section of his masterpiece “Invisible Man” Ellison permits a southern black sharecropper to speak with relish of how he routinely has sex with his own young daughter? It’s beginning to appear that I, for one, will not live to see these disapproving Jewish readers of mine attain that level of tolerant sophistication, free from knee-jerk prudery, that has long been commonplace among African-Americans when reading their own writers.

Photograph: Ellen Dubin Photography

Judith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a staff writer in 2000.